The Nature Of Hearsay (Part 1)

The nature of hearsay is far simpler than those who believe in it like to pretend and also far more epistemologically complex in another sense than the same people would dare to realize.  The simple but deep truth is that no rational person ultimately believes someone else's accusations of murder or rape or disbelieves them, not because the accusation is true or false, but because there is no way to prove which it is.  A more complex ramification is that no war, assassination, coronation, election, death, or plague of history can truly be known to have occurred when there is no logical proof, only hearsay in the form of oral tradition or written accounts.  Epistemological limitations that prevent one from knowing if the latest back and forth accusations from one living person to another are the same ones that prevent one from genuinely knowing the contents of human events in the distant past.  In short, hearsay cannot be known to be true or false.

Logical possibilities and evidential probabilities are the only things that can be known beyond logical axioms, their ramifications, one's existence, one's perceptions, and the miscellaneous metaphysical or epistemological truths that necessarily follow from these things.  Part of being human is to not be able to see into the minds of others or even know they exist, though people can delude themselves into believing they actually can.  Part of being human is to not know if one's general sensory perceptions correspond to the external world.  To be human, moreover, is in part to not be able to to know if what one remembers happening actually happened.  This is not true of only some humans, but of every being with my epistemological limitations.  Only fools assume anything at all one way another or believe something to the contrary of these facts.

One can take accusations, possibilities, and probabilities seriously despite knowing they are not self-evident like axioms or absolutely certain like strictly logical truths or introspective awareness.  Yes, to recognize the true nature of logical necessity and proof and how many things cannot possibly be known as long as one has human limitations does not mean one has to ignore genuine possibilities, trivialize the content of every accusation, or refrain from discovering what would or would not be the case if a given example of hearsay is true.  It is just that, regardless of the source, be it personal, professional, or journalistic, there is no such thing as hearsay that proves anything more than that that one has encountered hearsay.  

To verify claims that go beyond logically necessary truths (which do include the fact that some things are possible and impossible even if the former cannot be proven to be true beyond mere possibility), one must make assumptions, and assumptions are by nature irrational.  To verify hearsay, one must go beyond hearsay, yet one can only prove that certain historical ("This figure uttered these words hundreds of years ago"), scientific ("Quantum particles on Mars behave in this way"), or personal ("Yesterday, my parents told me . . .") claims are possible or that there is or is not particular evidence for them.  They did not happen or not happen by logical necessity, and thus they cannot be proven to have happened or not occured: the only past event that can be proven is that an uncaused cause created the universe and time and the only past events that can be proven to have not happened are ones that contradict themselves and/or logical axioms.

When it comes to Christianity, the historical evidence for the existence of figures like Jesus himself, John the Baptist, Gamaliel, and various other people of the New Testament and Old Testament accounts is so strong that the evidence in favor of Christianity is massive, despite the fact that it does not logically follow from any amount of historical evidence that a specific event like the resurrection of Christ--or the Napoleonic Wars or the Battle of Thermopylae or the coronation of any queen or king--actually happened.  After all, sensory (with the one exception I have emphasized repeatedly) and memory perceptions are not absolutely certain except as experiences that might or might not connect with anything beyond one's own consciousness.  To believe any hearsay, any at all, is thoroughly inept in light of this.